Archive for the 'Accessibility' topic

In this week’s article, we reprint an article by Derek Featherstone where he recalls a conversation with a designer looking to integrate accessibility into her current projects. Here’s an excerpt from the article We weren’t talking about getting started with the concepts and principles of accessibility. That’s pretty straightforward and from our conversation she had a […]

In today’s article, I discuss three radical redesign approach strategies. Here’s an excerpt from the article: It’s your most loyal customers who will hate your flip-the-switch redesign the most. Designers are quick to declare, “Users hate change.” But that’s not it at all. Your loyal users have invested a lot over the years mastering your current design, […]

In this week’s UIEtips, we offer an article from Whitney Quesenbery. She teaches us how user research can move the accessibility of your designs from good enough to great. Here’s an excerpt from the article: If you don’t include people who access technology in different ways in your user research and usability testing, you will never […]

Join us on March 12, when Whitney Quesenbery returns to the virtual seminar program for her seminar, Better Accessibility through Your User Research. Making a web for everyone means applying all of our design research tools to include people with a broader range of capabilities. Whitney Quesenbery pushes designers to challenge the old belief that […]

Accessibility is often focused on how to design and build digital products or physical spaces. But understanding the people with disabilities who will use those products is just as important. Enter ethnography and the importance of research that goes “face to face” with real people in the real world.

WordPress powers over 25 million sites with more than 14 billion pages viewed each month, making it one of the most popular web publishing platforms. Imagine if every one of those sites was accessible. Joe O’Connor has been a leader in making that happen, through the WordPress accessibility team which works from the inside to make WordPress into a web publishing platform for everyone.

Web accessibility takes place on a foundation of technologies, the most common of which are developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web Consortium, or W3C. Its success is dependent on how well these underlying technologies support accessible user experiences. Fortunately for us, people like Steve Faulkner devote much of their time to ensure technology specifications, such as HTML5, include the hooks that make it possible to build an accessible and enjoyable user experience for everyone.

Accessibility research can help us better understand how people with disabilities use the web and what we in product design and development can do to make that experience more successful and enjoyable. However, accessibility research is often carried out in academia. The valuable insights gained through research are shared and built upon among scholars, but often do not make their way into the practice of people who are designing and building digital products and services.

If you work in user experience or accessibility, you probably spend part of your time on advocacy–making the case for a new design idea or a new way of working. Lawsuits are the ultimate way to get two sides to come to an agreement, but it’s also an extremely confrontational style of advocacy. A more collaborative process might be a better way to reach your goal with an agreement that is a win for everyone.

If you work in media broadcasting or telecommunications you have probably heard of the U.S. legislation called CVAA, shorthand for the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act. This law, signed by President Obama in October 2010, seeks to ensure that accessibility requirements keep pace with advances in communication technologies.